Chances are, you’ve at some point encountered a scenario where you’ve poured too much liquid into a cup and needed to find a way to get it back into the bottle.
If you were lucky, it was water from a wide-mouthed bottle that you could easily transfer back.
If you weren’t so lucky, it was 60-year-old Macallan single-malt scotch whisky, each teaspoon of which is worth more than $13,000.
Regardless of the stakes, you probably considered two options of how to proceed:
- Hold the lip of the cup right up against the mouth of the bottle and tilt slowly and steadily.
- Hold the cup above the mouth of the bottle, decisively commit to the pour, and hope to direct the thin, focused stream back through the narrow opening of the bottle.
At first glance, the second option feels unnecessarily risky.
With the first, more cautious approach, we have the security of knowing we can pull back on our the pour at any time and limit our losses.
By tilting the cup far enough to produce a focused stream of liquid, on the other hand, we’re committing to losing a significant amount of our overall store should our aim be off.
And yet, if you’ve attempted each of these approaches yourself, you’ve probably realized your instinct to take the cautious approach was wrong.
That more often than not, the timid, measured approach often results in more liquid dribbling down the side of the cup than actually ending up in the bottle.
If you’re like me, you’ve experienced this situation enough times to know better.
And yet we often continue to make the cautious, timid approach to our own detriment, time and time again.
The problem, I think, is the level of transparency of the risk involved with each approach.
The risk of committing to the pour is immediately obvious.
The risk of the timid approach, on the other hand, is obscured by an illusion of control and safety.
And so we consistently opt for the option with the veneer of safety rather than the option that’s actually more likely to give us the outcome we’re hoping for.
Minimum Viable Commitment
This flawed approach to decision-making plays out well beyond attempting to transfer liquid from one vessel to another.
In fact, it shows up in almost any decision that revolves around committing our time, energy, and resources.
In our creative work, this most often plays out in how we approach our marketing strategies.
Whether it’s starting a new content channel like a newsletter, YouTube channel, or podcast, or experimenting with a new social platform, we tend to go in with a “test and assess” mentality before committing fully.
This approach makes sense.
With so many potential options available to us, we want to make sure we’re investing our time and resources wisely. We want to see some proof of our effort in order to justify our continued investment.
The problem is that with many endeavours, it’s almost impossible to see any positive result without fully committing to the process.
Content marketing is a perfect example.
There’s almost zero chance that you’ll see a meaningful return on your investment before publishing 50 or 100 videos, podcast episodes, or newsletter issues.
Similarly, there’s almost zero chance you’ll have any success on a given social platform without showing up meaningfully on a consistent basis for 3–6 months.
Upfront commitment, it turns out—without any proof or promise of future results—is often a prerequisite for the results we’re chasing.
In other words, we have to commit to the pour first, and then do our best to direct that stream of energy and effort toward our desired result.
How to Know Where to Commit Your Resources
Of course, we all have a limited amount of time and energy available.
Which means committing ourselves fully to one area will leave us unable to commit to others.
So how do we choose where and when to commit to the pour when we can’t base our decision on results?
I think there are two considerations.
1. Confidence In Your Ability to Hit the Target
If a given project or practice requires more than we suspect we have the ability or bandwidth to fully commit to–financially, energetically, or otherwise—we’re better off avoiding it.
That might mean intentionally choosing an alternative with lower potential upside, but which we have more confidence in our ability to attain.
A podcast has much lower discoverability potential than YouTube, for example. But if creating a sufficiently high-quality podcast to be seen as legitimate by your audience would take you half as long and cost half as much as achieving the same standard on YouTube, it’s likely a better option.
2. Self-Knowledge, -Awareness & Intuition
While dabbling in a practice might not be enough to get you meaningful results, it’s often enough to light the spark of curiosity and excitement in you as a creator.
That spark is as good a sign as any of a practice worth committing to.
This is because in many cases, the length of commitment required to get the results we’re after demands that we actually enjoy the practice we’ve committed to if we have any hope of keeping it up in the absence of meaningful results in the short term.
A good approach, then, is to dabble just enough to identify the spark of a delicious challenge we’re excited to sink our teeth into.
Then, once we find it, commit to the pour fully, and without hesitation.
All Or Nothing
Results have a way of coming to those willing to commit with no guarantee that their effort will amount to anything.
On the surface, choosing to commit in this manner feels irrational, if not outright irresponsible.
When you commit to the pour, after all, there’s no way back.
No way to recover the expenditure of time, money, and energy we’ve now put forth.
But perhaps recovery shouldn’t be a consideration in the first place.
If we’re truly willing to commit the resources required to achieve an outcome, we should commit them upfront, without caveat or safeguard, and then do what we can to focus and direct them to our intended target.
Directing the pour accurately requires confidence, faith, a steady hand, and often a little luck.
Occasionally, we’ll miss the mark and spill those resources out across the floor.
But in the end, it’s better to suffer the occasional wasted effort while making an honest, committed attempt than to slowly and consistently let our time, energy and effort dribble down the side of the cup, never giving ourselves a real shot at success.
It’s mildly annoying to let water run down the side of the cup and into the sink.
Heart-breaking to do the same for a $1.9M bottle of whisky.
But I can think of nothing more agonizing than letting a life dribble away because we were afraid to ever commit it fully to a goal worth pursuing.
Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters
This article originally appeared in my weekly Creative Wayfinding Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.
A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.
Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilds of creating work that matters?”
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.
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